In giving to the young especially a new pride in their country and in their own, great and distinctive national heritage, it did a great deal to strengthen the national character and to make it more independent and self-reliant. It started the great work of rooting out the slavery which centuries of dependency and subjection had bred into the marrow of the race. Mr Arthur Griffith has admitted that the present generation could never have effected this work had not Parnell and his generation done their brave labour before them, but considered in themselves the achievements of the Gaelic League can only be described as mighty both in the actual revolution it wrought in the moral, intellectual and spiritual sphere, in the reaction it created against the coarser materialism of imported modes and manners, and in the new spirit which it breathed into the entire people. Coincident with the foundation of the Gaelic League, other regenerative influences were also at work. These aimed at the economic reconstruction and the industrial development of the country by the inculcation of the principles of self-help, self-reliance and co-operation, and by the wider dissemination of technical instruction and agricultural education. Ireland, by reason, I suppose, of its condition, its arrested development and its psychology, is a country much given to "new movements," most of which have a very brief existence. They are born but to breathe and then expire. In the ease, however, of the Gaelic League, and the movements for co-operation amongst the farmers, and for technical instruction in the arts and crafts most suitable to the country, these movements were conceived and created strongly to endure. And to the credit of their authors and, be it said also, of the country for whose upliftment and betterment they were intended, they have endured greatly, and greatly fulfilled their purpose.